Jessie Caesar

S3787379

The assessment declaration. [I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration – https://www.rmit.edu.au/students/support-and-facilities/student-support/equitable-learning-services (Links to an external site.)]

WEEK ONE

WEEK TWO

WEEK THREE

WEEK FOUR

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY (word count: 1,786)

SELECTED TEXT ONE:

Norman, D 1999, ‘Affordance, conventions and design (Part 2)’, Nielsen Norman Group, viewed 11 March 2020, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordance_conv.html

This article explores the concepts of ‘affordances’, ‘constraints’ and ‘conceptual models’ – and is particularly concerned with attempting “to understand how we managed in a world of tens of thousands of objects, many of which we would encounter only once”. The article provides us with an insight into Norman’s concepts ‘affordances’ (which “was invented by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977, 1979) to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal). To Gibson, affordances are relationships. They exist naturally: they do not have to be visible, known, or desirable.”); ‘perceived affordances’ (“which are not at all the same as real ones…The designer cares more about what actions the user perceives to be possible than what is true. Moreover, affordances, both real and perceived, play very different roles in physical products than they do in the world of screen-based products…In product design, where one deals with real, physical objects, there can be both real and perceived affordance”); ‘conventions’ (“A convention is a constraint in that it prohibits some activities and encourages others. Physical constraints make some actions impossible: there is no way to ignore them. “) and ‘constraints’ (which can be broken into three types, Physical (“Physical constraints are closely related to real affordances: For example, it is not possible to move the cursor outside the screen: this is a physical constraint. “); Logical (“Logical constraints use reasoning to determine the alternatives. Thus, if we ask the user to click on five locations and only four are immediately visible, the person knows, logically, that there is one location off the screen. Logical constraints are valuable in guiding behavior.”) and Cultural (“Cultural constraints are conventions shared by a cultural group. The fact that the graphic on the right-hand side of a display is a “scroll bar” and that one should move the cursor to it, hold down a mouse button, and “drag” it downward in order to see objects located below the current visible set (thus causing the image itself to appear to move upwards) is a cultural, learned convention.”). Furthermore, the article discusses that “understanding how to operate a novel device had [has] three major dimensions: conceptual models, constraints, and affordances” arguing that the “most important part of a successful design is the underlying conceptual model“. The article states that the ‘conceptual model’ “is the hard part of design: formulating an appropriate conceptual model and then assuring that everything else be consistent with it…The power of constraints has largely been ignored.”

This article is posted to a website, in a blog-type format, making the information within the article extremely condensed, yet packed full with content and concepts, making it extremely accessible to readers. The article is published to Don Norman’s (the author and professors) website, making the information within reliable. The article makes no mention of SNSs due to both its publication date, and that it is more interested with the foundational concepts of affordances, conventions and constraints, which enable us to understand and analyse the difference between good and poorly made products and software – which we can then apply to softwares such as Instagram, itself.

While the article makes no reference to Instagram or any other SNS, it regardless provides us with the foundations required to understand and respond to the courses prompt – How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published, and distributed in the network?

SELECTED TEXT TWO:

Lister, M et al 2009, New Media: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, New York. (Sections: Networks, Users and Economics pp 163-169; Wiki Worlds and Web 2.0 pp 204-209; The Long Tail pp 197-200; User-generated content, we are all fans now pp 221-232.)

This text is an introduction to ‘new media’ (which “actually refers to a wide range of changes in media production, distribution and use. These are changes that are technological, textual, conventional and cultural… a number of concepts have come to the fore which offer to define the key characteristics of the field of new media as a whole…These are: digital, interactive, hypertexual, virtual, networked, and simulated.) and technology, presenting us with the “conceptual frameworks for thinking through a range of key issues which have arisen over two decades of speculation on the cultural implications of new media” and the “questions, the ideas and debates – the critical issues – that the emergence of new media technologies have given rise to”. The selected chapters within this text take an exploration into the concepts ‘Web.1.0’ (the original and first form of the internet created by DARPA); ‘Web2.0’ (“is allegedly characterised by co-creativity, participation and openness, represented by softwares that support, for example, wiki based ways of creating and accessing knowledge, social networking sites, blogging, tagging and ‘mash ups’”); ‘Networks’ (“Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US, and it was this Pentagon-funded agency that eventually developed the protocols…in order to allow computers to form networks that could send small packets of data to one another.”); ‘The Long Tail’ (“the economic basis of production is changing in ways that unlock market diversity on an unprecedented scale.”); ‘Users’ (“this shift from ‘audience’ to ‘user’ in media studies…it also brings within our reach the possibility of becoming producers in our own right.”) and ‘User-generated content’ (e.g. “every SNS post, or conversation in a chat room, every home page and downloaded MP3 playlist facilitates the individual communicating in a pseudo public mode of address. What is clear is that a great deal of web use facilitates a feeling of participation in media space”) and presents us with the theory and definition behind these concepts as a means to evaluate how technology has developed over time, and the way it may continue to develop in the future. Authors place more importance on the Web2.0, rather than the Web1.0 and are particularly concerned with “the ways in which the desire for communication and the pressures of commercialisation have interacted to bring us Web 2.0 and its expression in the form of social networking sites (SNS)”. To understand these concepts, authors break down the information into easily accessible chapters with in depth summaries of each chapter provided at the introduction of the text.

This second edition text, due to the aforementioned summaries of each chapter above, the text itself is not only highly accessible, but reliable. It’s written in clear and concise language, that’s easy to understand, and is a guide/introduction to ‘new media’ studies for students – meaning it was written in a way that is easier to digest. Not only this, but the text provides an explanation for almost all concepts, bringing in the explanation of each concept in the order that they appear in web history or as they are brought up in previous explanations, and provides us with a quiet up-to-date analysis of ‘new media’ concepts and the technology that surrounds them. While the text does make some analysis of SNSs (such as Flickr), its release date was prior to the release of Instagram, thus no mention of that social networking site is made. However, the theories presented in the text can be applied to Instagram and other newer SNSs, as the author does does make note that the studies presented within the text can be used in future as a means of understanding newer technologies, if used with other newer resources that make in-depth research of the platform (Instagram) itself.

Despite the text not making reference to Instagram, it does offer a plethora of information that’s relative to the concepts that are presented in the course, as well as the courses prompt – How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published, and distributed in the network? With selected chapters ‘Networks, Users and Economics’; ‘Wiki Worlds and Web 2.0’ and ‘User-generated content, we are all fans now’ in specific providing plentiful amounts of information and discussions relative to the courses prompt and concepts. This, paired with its easily accessible chapters and chapter guides at the beginning of the text, makes for a great starting point when commencing further research into the courses prompt.

SELECTED TEXT THREE:

Hinton, S & Hjorth L 2013, Understanding Social Media. Sage Publications, London 2013. (Section: pp. 1-31).

This text provides an exploration of the concepts ‘new media’ and ‘social media’ in relation to the relationship between technology and society and economics. The text is particularly concerned with how social media arose, whilst considering ‘new media’; how social media can re-define our idea of what ‘social’ is; “the commercialisation of the web… marked by this change in attitude, which is described in business literature as the emergence of Web2.0(“Web 2.0 doesn’t refer to any changes in the internet’s architecture. Rather, it refers to the types of software employed and changes at the level of user practices”)” and questioning the “changing nature of what is public and what is private, and where work ends and life begins, as social media infiltrates every facet of everyday life”. To do this, the authors take a look into ‘Web1.0′(nobody talked about Web1.0 until the term Web2.0 emerged. The tag ‘2.0’ evokes the idea of software versioning and its associated marketings, and so suggests that Web1.0 was less evolved, less sophisticated and less refined”), ‘Web2.0’, ‘new media’, ‘social networking sites (SNSs)’, how technology continues “to move into mainstream everyday life in many urban settings globally” and how “SNSs evolve, the term ‘social media’ (“social media bleeds across platforms (desktop computers, mobile phones, tablets and on modern network-capable televisions) across social and media contexts, and creates various forms of presence”) is developing to encompass the growing and often unwieldy sphere of contemporary online media practice”.

While this text is mildly clunky, as the information you are looking for is embedded among other related, but not necessary information. The text itself, however, is presented neatly, and into chapters that attempt to make it easier to find the information you are looking for (i.e. ‘Web2.0’ on pp. 16), making it quiet accessible to the reader. The information presented is up-to-date and applicable to the courses prompt, as the publication date supersedes the launch of Instagram in 2010. It is also a reliable source as the text is a first edition book through a publication, written by a lecturer and a professor from the universities – University of Canberra and RMIT University.

Authors makes reference to many new SNSs including Google and Facebook but makes no reference to Instagram. It does, however, provide us with critical information regarding social media and gives a great foundational point for us to commence further research on the platform. The text explores concepts that are directly related to the courses content and prompt – How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published, and distributed in the network? Despite the text making no reference to the SNS in question, it does explore concepts such as ‘new media’, ‘web1.0’, ‘web2.0’ and even the acronym SNS itself, that are vital to understanding the courses core concepts – especially those related to the course prompt.